In conventional audio disc playback apparatus the pick up arm is mounted on the turntable baseplate. Thus, even in high quality systems the pick up arm is subject to vibration produced by the rotation of the turntable platter and its associated drive motor. These vibrations inevitably detract from the tracking accuracy of the stylus. Although this mistracking is small it can become a significant problem in high quality audio systems where other causes of poor sound quality have been minimised.
The problems caused by these turntable platter and motor generated vibrations have previously been dealt with by mounting the pick up arm on a damped baseplate. This can be, for example, by spring or rubber mounting. Such methods provide only a partial solution to the problem since, whilst they are effective in damping certain frequencies of vibration, they can suffer from resonant effects at other frequencies.